St Giles Hospital is a former almshouse occupying 147-155 St Owen’s Street, Hereford, and now offering sheltered housing for the elderly. It consists of a terrace of five cottages built c.1770, a single storey and attic high with a pediment in the centre. Construction is of dressed sandstone with a brick pediment and eaves and a 20thc concrete tiled roof. The Hospital was formerly the residential part of a complex that also included a 12thc circular chapel immediately to the SE, whose foundations were uncovered during road-widening work in 1927. On the gabled wall at the NW end of the almshouses is reset a Herefordshire School tympanum from St Giles Chapel nearby. This is now protected by a glass-fronted case installed by Headland Archaeology in 2013.

The Hospital Chapel was built on land that had belonged to the Lacy family in the 12thc. Following the account given in Thurlby (1999), 116, Earl Roger of Hereford ganted all the land of the fee of Walter de Lacy outside St Owen’s Gate to St Guthlac’s Priory. In 1141-55. St Giles’ Hospital, in Saint Owen Street, was founded in 1290 for the use of the Friars Grisey, a fraternity of monks. It became the property of the Knights Templar and later passed to the Crown. King Richard ll donated it to the City for use as an almshouse for five poor men. Each was granted a small patch of garden and a suit of clothes every three years. They were bound to attend services twice a week at the nearby Saint Giles’ Chapel.

The composition may be compared by other Herefordshire School work at Shobdon and Rowlestone (the latter under the patronage of Payn fitzJohn and Sybil de Lacy, holders of the land on which St Giles was built).